The Ants at War
by Michael Odom (January 2019)
Ants, Mircea Constantinescu
The Colony Crosses a Stream
Mortis and half-drowning ant clasps.
Like philosophies. Live souls walk on corpses
Over never-ending crisis,
Paving impermanence with a host of either/ors,
If/thens, ands, and first premises.
Rigid tenets. Antennae. Ants lose their grips,
Break or drop from even ant dreams.
Which of the ants…? How could ants know which is
The shore worth death, worth bridging seems
For need of is?
The Ants at War
I
Ninety
Degrees to clouds,
Girded to sky and earth,
A human mound. Scaling the side:
One ant.
II
Circles
Reel in the wind,
Spindling, spindling
Air, like fear, like panicked blind canes:
Ant eyes.
III
Bach suite.
A din of points
Of harpsichord tapping
In the mite’s ear. The ants at war,
Silent.
IV
For you,
Larvae in tombs,
We have lived out ant lives,
Lived out life on the floor in dirt,
Eking.
V
Running,
Like men through tires,
The ants work through the weave—
Broad red, broad white, vast blue—or stand
On stars.
VI
One. One
Spun antenna
Tires in time and stops
Still and blind in shadow and space.
Ant. Earth.
VII
Listening
Ant. The closed ranks
And larvae underneath
Have never known this chemical.
Silence.
VIII
Soldier
With no army.
Worker with no work.
Carpenter, no queen. Forager,
One ant.
IX
Trit trits—
Harpsichord runs
To beetles, timpani
To mites, stampeding ballet troupes,
Ant trails.
X
Wear ash.
Bite skin that’s bone.
Drag sinew from your teeth.
Heads walk nude on sticks in a row.
No grief.
XI
One ant,
Mad with feelers,
Stands in the canopy
Of blades and flowers, alert,
And stopped.
XII
One ant
From the tunnels,
From the body traffic
Of queen and ground, in the cyclone
Feels sky.
XIII
The flood
Comes down the hole.
And the goddess of bugs
Floats with her faithful foragers.
What’s hell?
XIV
The roads
Arc like gentle
Horizons, grades are hills,
Mountains are plains, drips of sweat, ponds.
Ants cross.
______________________
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast